The woman across the aisle on the bus into town was reading a paperback with a pencil in her hand, which is not how most people read novels. She read the way one reads a lease. Her eyes dropped to the foot of each page, stopped there, and a small tick went into the margin. When we braked at the lights I could make out the cover, and the cover gave me a title that is also a date of birth: Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982. I knew the book, and so I knew what lives at the foot of its pages. It took me the rest of the journey to decide whether the pencil was an insult to the novel or the highest compliment it could be paid.
Cho Nam-joo's novel appeared from the Seoul publisher Minumsa in October 2016. It is a slim book of under two hundred pages by a woman who had worked for nine years as a television scriptwriter, and, depending on which report one reads, she wrote it in two or three months. Its heroine is thirty-three, a former employee of a publicity agency who gave up her job when her daughter was born. One day she begins to speak in other people's voices, first her own mother's and later that of a woman from her husband's student days who has since died. The husband, alarmed, sends her to a psychiatrist, and the book we are holding is that psychiatrist's report. It takes her life in order, from a childhood in which a younger brother is plainly the favoured child, through school and a first job, to marriage and the arrival of the baby, and at the foot of the page it pins the figures that show the life to be an ordinary one.
The usual complaint is easy to state, and I shall state it fairly. The prose is flat. The characters are types, the episodes are summarised and not dramatised, and one American reviewer, writing in Booklist, thought the whole thing half coming-of-age story and half encyclopaedia entry. A reader who comes to a novel for its sentences will go hungry here. My argument is that the flatness is the method, and that the book is better built than its detractors allow. Cho has chosen to write her novel in the one genre that exists to decide whose account of herself is to be believed, which is the case file. Once that is seen, the plain voice stops being a failure of style and becomes the subject of the book.
Begin with the title. A book that names its heroine in the manner of a register entry, with surname, given name and year of birth, is already telling us what kind of document it is. Kim is, as I understand it, the commonest surname in Korea, and the National Book Foundation's note on the novel describes Jiyoung as the most common name for Korean baby girls. The heroine is a placeholder before she is a person. She is the woman one would find by pulling a file at random from a drawer, and Cho wants us to understand that the drawer is full of her.
Western readers will recognise the lineage. Freud's account of the patient he called Dora, published in 1905, is a case history in which the doctor's interpretation outranks anything the young woman says about her own life. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story of 1892, 'The Yellow Wallpaper', gives us a woman prescribed rest by her physician husband and driven further into breakdown by it. Both set a woman's testimony inside a medical frame and let the frame do the judging. Cho's frame is of the same family, and its first effect is to take the heroine's voice away. Jiyoung scarcely speaks in her own person in this book. When she does speak with force, in the possession scenes, she does so as someone else. At a Chuseok gathering, the autumn harvest festival, in her in-laws' house, she answers her mother-in-law in her own mother's voice and says what a daughter-in-law is not permitted to say in her own. I understand that Korean folk tradition has long allowed the dead and the absent to say what the living cannot, though I make no claim to expertise in that field. Whatever its ancestry, the device is exact: in this household, a woman can be heard only when she is somebody else.
The life the report records is not extreme, and that is deliberate. A family in which the little brother is treated as a prince. An office in which a woman's career is understood to be on loan. A young mother who sits in a park with a takeaway coffee and learns that strangers have a word for women like her, and that the word is the name of an insect. Cho told the Korea Herald that she wanted the heroine's experience to be read as the consequence of her sex, and not of poverty or of geography, and that explains the shape of the thing. Jiyoung is educated, reasonably comfortable and married to a man who is no brute. Cho has removed the other variables, as an experimenter does, so that only one remains. The footnotes do the rest, and Cho has said, according to the New York Times, that she added the data so that the story could not be dismissed as one woman's invention. As the reviewer for Locus magazine noted, they supply figures on matters such as the small number of women in management posts and point to the articles and studies behind them, which is why stretches of the book read like a stiff, formal essay. They read like one because they are meant to be checked.
All of this is set-up for the final chapter, headed 2016, and here the book proves cleverer than its reputation. The narrator steps forward and turns out to be the psychiatrist himself. He is sympathetic, even earnest. He tells us that Jiyoung's story has shown him a world he had not considered, and he tries for a moment to set her troubles beside those of women he knows. He credits his wife with having taught him to notice these things, and then describes finding her, a former mathematical prodigy, working through elementary exercise books for pleasure, which he finds baffling, wishing she would find something better to enjoy. Then his own clinic comes into view, where a female employee is leaving because she is pregnant, and his conclusion is that the next person he hires had better be unmarried. He regards himself, if I read the last pages correctly, as an enlightened man, and the chapter exists to show the opposite. The person who has compiled the file, with its figures and its patience, has not understood it. This is what the novel is really about. It does not argue that the statistics will persuade. It shows us a man who has the statistics in his hand and remains unpersuaded, and it ends on his sentence and not hers. Knowing the figures and seeing the woman are different acts, and the book's last voice belongs to someone who has managed only the first.
What followed has the neatness of an afterword. In November 2018 Minumsa announced that the novel had passed a million copies, the first Korean novel to do so since Shin Kyung-sook's Please Look After Mom in 2009, and the publisher credited the #MeToo movement with reviving interest in it. The Korea Herald reported in the same piece that people online who claimed to be men had vowed to boycott the actress cast in the film adaptation, and that a singer in a girl group had been cyberbullied merely for saying she had read the book. None of this bears on literary merit. It does bear on design. A book that anticipates its worst readers in its last chapter is either prophetic or lucky, and a former scriptwriter is likelier to have known her audience than to have been lucky. A novel that ends on a man who cannot be persuaded had its thesis tested in public, and some of its first readers behaved very much as the doctor does. Abroad the book travelled well. According to the Korea Times, the Japanese edition, published on 8 December 2018, reached first place in Amazon Japan's Asian literature category within three days, and the National Book Foundation in New York, which longlisted the English translation for its 2020 prize in translated literature, recorded sales in nineteen countries.
The strongest objection deserves a hearing. The critic Jeon Sung-wook argued in a book of that year that the novel reduces complicated experiences of oppression and alienation to familiar formulas and goes no further than the feminist writing that preceded it, and I have some sympathy with him. The husband means well, and the harm is done mostly by ordinary people in ordinary ways, which suits the design and may strike a reader as convenient. The book has one thing to say. It says it with great control, and it declines to complicate it. Cho herself has described the heroine as a vessel for experiences common to Korean women, and a vessel, by definition, has no weather of her own. That is the price of the method, and the book pays it knowingly: Jiyoung is drawn to be representative, and a reader who wants a particular woman and not a case may feel the lack. I admired the novel more than I enjoyed it, and I doubt that a second reading would yield what the first does. But it was never meant for rereading. It was meant to be signed, like a petition, and a petition is not to be faulted for lacking a plot, any more than a footnote is to be faulted for lacking charm.
English readers have it in Jamie Chang's translation, which the Booklist reviewer found leaning towards British vernacular, a remark that interested me a good deal more than it ought, given the nature of this blog. The footnotes survive the crossing intact, as figures do. It is the voices, I suspect, that lose something, since the possession scenes lean on registers of address that English cannot mark. The English edition reached Britain from Simon & Schuster in February 2020 and the United States from Liveright in the same year. A word, too, on the 2019 film directed by Kim Do-young. As I understand it, the film recasts the psychiatrist as a woman, drops the doctor's closing chapter altogether and ends with the heroine beginning to write her own account. That is a kinder ending and a different argument. The book is harder on its readers. It leaves the last word with the man, and it leaves the heroine where the file leaves her.
Does so plain a book belong beside the novels I usually write about here? I think it does, under another heading. It is not a triumph of style. It is a triumph of placement: of knowing where to put a woman's life, which is in a file, whom to put in charge of the file, which is a man of goodwill, and where to stop, which is on his sentence and not hers. Few novels trust their form as completely as this one does, and fewer have been tested by their readers so promptly.
I thought again of the woman on the bus. Two stops before mine she slid the pencil into the spine, closed the book and got off, and I never saw whether she had reached the last chapter. I hope she had not. The best reader of this novel is the one who arrives at the doctor still holding the pencil, and who finds out what the figures were for.
Recommended Resources
☞ Purchase (Korean Edition): 82nyeonsaeng Kim Jiyeong (82년생 김지영), Cho Nam-joo, Aladin Bookstore
☞ English Edition: Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, Cho Nam-joo (translated by Jamie Chang), Amazon
'Ex Oriente, Lux.'
— James L. Fleming, Edinburgh
※ Published under the author's editorial persona. See the About page for how this comes to be.
Sources
- Im Eun-byel, 'Feminist book "Kim Ji-young, Born 1982" becomes million seller', The Korea Herald, 28 November 2018.
- Elise Hu, 'South Korean Bestseller "Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982" Gives Public Voice To Private Pain', NPR, 19 April 2020.
- National Book Foundation, 'Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982', Longlist, National Book Awards 2020, Translated Literature.